J.D. Drift - A Chronicle of Space and Time - Series 1 Volume 1 (A Boy and His Universe)

Martin No author does Machiavellian political intrigue quite like George R.

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When one of our favorite characters dies, we fear for the next one. These names will remain iconic figures in fantasy literature long after many books on this list go out of print. With several narratives weaving in and out of the magical romance, Morgenstern expertly weaves a beautiful tapestry of a novel, that soars as high as the tents in the fictional circus.

The City of Brass by S. Set in the 18th century, readers meet Nahri, a skilled con woman who swindles her way through life… until she makes a mistake of magical consequences. She summons a djinn warrior, and finds herself thrown into the magical, mythical world she never believed existed. And at the heart of that world, is the City of Brass, a place called Daevabad. Multi-POV narratives can be challenging to sustain even when all the characters are in the same story—doing it with six separate, barely-connected narratives is almost a magic trick.

The Fifth Season by N. Jemisin The first book in N. The Fifth Season also boasts a complex protagonist who is a mother, gifting us with one of the most formidable and fascinating characters of the 21st century. The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson In exploring a shocking question—What happens if the hero fails and the villain reigns?

It boasts all of the best fantasy elements: But Sanderson weaves those predictable elements into a breathtaking saga that promises twists every step of the way. When a young soldier groomed to take over the oppressive, military government decides to turn his back on the regime, he collides with a young scholar determined to save her brother. The story continues in A Torch Against the Night. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.

And we got that plus a lot more: In the conclusion to the seven-book series J.

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An archetypal, alchemy-suffused coming-of-age tale set in a highly clever and lavishly realized alternate world, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the kind of book you read over and over, simply because the culmination is so satisfying. A flawed piece of prose but a wonderful finale to a thoroughly marvelous concept.

All those are in peak form in his masterwork, The Way of Kings , the first of his three-book-long-and-counting series The Stormlight Archive. Roshar is a world where magic is rare, but spren—the spirits of just about every object or idea—are common. A few magic items like soulcasters, shard blades and shard plates are remnants of a grander age. In nations like Alethkar and Jah Keved, light eyes are revered, while those with dark eyes remain a lower caste. The Way of Kings is told from the points-of-view of four loosely connected characters, but the main focus is on Kaladin, a darkeyed soldier betrayed by his light-eyed commander and sold into slavery.

With every shred of humanity and defiance beaten out of him, his final indignity is getting forced to carry bridges to the frontlines of an endless war—a death sentence. But his fellow crewman of Bridge Four find brotherhood and redemption in the most hopeless of places. His years there are filled with young love, rivalry with wealthier classmates and music.

Kvothe the narrator is a world-renowned magician, musician and sword-fighter, but his autobiography is a coming-of-age story with full of hardship and drama. And Patrick Rothfuss is the kind of writer that transcends genre qualifiers. The prose is masterful with rich characterization exhilarating storytelling. It should be noted that most sf Future Histories which anticipate a Dark Age to come do so in the clear though sometimes unstated understanding that the Long Night is precisely an interregnum: The Long Night figures as an explanatory backstory in many novels and series set in Rimworld planets, hinterlands that — according to both Toynbee and Asimov — will eventually reinvigorate the centre.

What are we now? Twelve worlds and a thousand monuments to past glories. Living off memories and stories, and selling trinkets. We've become a tourist attraction. Vestigial Empires tend to leave behind still-working infrastructure especially roads or the nearest space-operatic equivalent as they shrink; frequently, they also leave behind a common language.

Generally their remaining bits are a hotbed of cutthroat politics, ruled by decadent nobles with superiority complexes and equally decadent and morally challenged courtiers. In Space, may result from an Ungovernable Galaxy. The protagonist is rarely actually from the Vestigial Empire—any time one is involved in a setting, it's usually it's either a source of villains, or a setting whose politics need to be navigated in order to obtain allies. Quite often, the only mention of them may be in a Cryptic Background Reference. Being a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to late imperial Rome or Byzantium isn't required, but it's definitely a bonus.

Contrast with Precursors — an entire species of Vestigial Empire which tends to leave little to no working infrastructure and is also long gone by the time the story takes place. All or part of the Vestigial Empire may be The Remnant if they're still fighting for the usually lost cause of restoring their former glory. An inversion is a Rising Empire. For a huge list of examples click here. After a time he was conducted to Cerdic's cabin. The place had a number of ethnic touches, such as a huge pair of tusks displayed on a bulkhead between shields and swords, animal skins on the deck, and a grotesque idol in one corner.

Flandry wondered if they were there merely because they were expected. Other furniture included a desk with infotrieve and computer terminal, bookrolls and a reader for them, a holoscreen, and, yes, a number of codex volumes bearing Anglic titles. The prince occupied an Imperial-made lounger, too. Jewelry glittered across his massive breast. I know the Empire—its self-seeking politicians and self-indulgent masses, corruption, intrigue, morality and sense of duty rotten to the heart, decline of art into craft and science into dogma, strength sapped by a despair too pervasive for you to realize what it is—aye, aye.

You were a great race once, you humans; you were among the first who aspired to the stars. But that was long ago. The accusation was oversimplified, probably disingenuous. Yet enough truth was in it to touch a nerve. Only, thought Flandry, first comes the Long Night. It begins with a pyrotechnic sunset across thousands of worlds, which billions of sentient beings will not see because they will be part of the flames. It deepens with famine, plague, more war, more destruction of what the centuries have built, until at last the wild folk howl in our temples—save where a myriad petty tyrants hold dreary court among the shards.

To say nothing of an end to good music and high cuisine, taste in clothes and taste in women and conversation as a fine art. Civilizations may last for centuries and be extremely eventful; Imperial Rome is a prime example. But autumn ends, and a civilization becomes a culture gone frozen in its brains and heart, and its finale is anything but grand.

We are now far into what the Chinese called the period of contending states , and the collapse of Caesarism. In such a period, politics becomes an arena of competing generals and plutocrats, under a dummy ruler chosen for low intelligence and complete moral plasticity, who amuses himself and keeps the masses distracted from their troubles with bread, circuses, and brushfire-wars. This is the time of all times when a culture should unite — and the time when such a thing has become impossible.

Technology flourishes the late Romans were first-class engineers but science disintegrates into a welter of competing, grandiosely trivial hypotheses which supersede each other almost weekly and veer more and more markedly toward the occult. Among the masses there arises a "second religiousness" in which nobody actually believes; an attempt is made to buttress this by syncretism , the wrenching out of context of religious forms from other cultures, such as the Indian, without the faintest hope of knowing what they mean.

This process, too, leads inevitably towards a revival of the occult, and here science and religion overlap, to the benefit of neither. Economic inequity, instability and wretchedness become endemic on a hitherto unprecedented scale; the highest buildings ever erected by the Classical culture were the tenements of the Imperial Roman slums, crammed to bursting point with freed and runaway slaves, bankrupts, and deposed petty kings and other political refugees.

The tragedy is that, despite what you hear on TV or read in the paper or online, this collapse was completely predictable. Scientifically speaking, oligarchies always collapse because they are designed to extract wealth from the lower levels of society, concentrate it at the top , and block adaptation by concentrating oligarchic power as well. Though it may take some time, extraction eventually eviscerates the productive levels of society, and the system becomes increasingly brittle. Internal pressures and the sense of betrayal grow as desperation and despair multiply everywhere except at the top, but effective reform seems impossible because the system seems thoroughly rigged.

In the final stages, a raft of upstart leaders emerge, some honest and some fascistic, all seeking to channel pent-up frustration towards their chosen ends. If we are lucky, the public will mobilize behind honest leaders and effective reforms. America has witnessed a similar cycle of oligarchic corruption [1] starting in the s, s, s, and s:.

Rigged systems erode the health of the larger society, and signs of crisis proliferate. The crisis reaches a breaking point, and seemingly small events trigger popular frustration into a transformative change. If the society enacts effective reforms, it enters a new stage of development. If it fails to enact reforms, crisis leads to regression and possibly collapse.

Over time, transformed societies forget why they implemented reforms; Economic Royalists creep back and the cycle starts a new. Reagan removes the Fairness Doctrine and stops enforcing antitrust laws; Economic elites argue we need to modernize finance by getting rid of Glass-Steagall; Tax rates on the wealthy plummet while infrastructure crumbles; The Supreme Court supports Citizens United and guts the Voting Rights Act; Gerrymandering increases.

As we wax hot in faction, In battle we wax cold; Wherefore men fight not as they fought In the brave days of old. Artwork by Richard Powers detail THERE is an old legend concerning a Roman Emperor, who, to show his power, singled out the Tribune of a loyal legion and commanded that he march his men across Asia to the end of the world. And so a thousand men vanished into the hinterland of the largest continent, to be swallowed up for ever. On some unknown battlefield the last handful of survivors must have formed a square which was overwhelmed by a barbarian charge.

And their eagle may have stood lonely and tarnished in a horsehide tent for a generation thereafter. But it may be guessed, by those who know of the pride of these men in their corps and tradition, that they did march east as long as one still remained on his feet. The First Galactic Empire was breaking up. Dictators, Emperors, Consolidators wrested the rulership of their own or kindred solar systems from Central Control. Space pirates raised flags and recruited fleets to gorge on spoil plundered from this wreckage. It was a time in which only the ruthless could flourish.

Here and there a man, or a group of men, tried vainly to dam the flood of disaster and disunion. And, notable among these last-ditch fighters who refused to throw aside their belief in the impartial rule of Central Control were the remnants of the Stellar Patrol , a law enforcement body whose authority had existed unchallenged for almost a thousand years.

Perhaps it was because there was no longer any security to be found outside their own ranks that these men clung the closer to what seemed in the new age to be an out worn code of ethics and morals. And their stubborn loyalty to a vanished ideal was both exasperating and pitiful to the new rulers.

Jorcam Dester, the last Control Agent of Deneb, who was nursing certain ambitions of his own, solved in the Roman manner the problem of ridding his sector of the Patrol He summoned the half dozen officers still commanding navigable ships and ordered them — under the seal of the Control — out into space, to locate as he said and re map forgotten galactic border systems no one had visited in at least four generations. He offered a vague promise to establish new bases from which the Patrol might rise again, invigorated and revived, to fight for the Control ideals.

And, faithful to their very ancient trust, they upped-ship on this mission, undermanned, poorly supplied, without real hope, but determined to carry out orders to the last. And she made a bad landing, for two of her eroded tubes blew just as the pilot tried to set her down on her fins. She had bounced then, bounced and buckled, and now she lay on her meteor-scarred side. The sled rode the air smoothly, purring gently.

That last tune-up they had given her had done the trick after all. Even though they had had to work from instructions recorded on a ten-year-old repair manual tape. She had been given the last of the condensers. They had practically no spare parts left now—. Since I was mustered into the service we have always done the best we could to make our own repairs—with what we could find or steal.

Once we had a complete overhaul—it took us almost three months—we had two wrecked ships to strip for other parts. What a wealth of supplies! That was on Karbon, four—no, five space years ago. We still had a head mech-techneer in the crew then and he supervised the job. Fylh—what was his name? He was a robot from Deneb II. We lost him the next year in an acid lake on a blue star world.

He was very good with engines—being one himself. Or perhaps it is too old so that it loses hold. Look at the sector wars, the pull for power between sector chiefs. Don't you think that Central Control would stop that—if it could?

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We are the stubborn survivals, the wrongheaded ones. We maintain that we, the Stellar Patrol, crewmen and rangers, still keep the peace and uphold galactic law. We fly here and there in ships which fall to pieces under us because there are no longer those with the knowledge and skill to repair them properly. We fight pirates and search forgotten skies—for what, I wonder?

We obey commands given to us over the signature of the two Cs. We are fast becoming an anachronism, antiques still alive but better dead. And one by one we vanish from space. We should all be rounded up and set in some museum for the planet-bound to gawk at, objects with no reasonable function—". Within five years we've lost touch with as many sectors, haven't we? In another generation it may not even be remembered. We've had a long run—about three thousand years—and the seams are beginning to gap. Sector wars now—the result—chaos. We'll slip back fast—probably far back, maybe even into planet-tied barbarianism with space flight forgotten.

Then we'll start all over again—". We have found us a world to make the best of right here and now. How far off civilized maps are we? They had flashed maps on the viewing screen in the ship, maps noted on tapes so old that the dates on them seemed wildly preposterous, maps of suns and stars no voyager had visited in two, three, five generations, where Control had had no contact for half a thousand years. Kartr had studied those maps for weeks. And on none of them had he seen this system. They were too far out—too near the frontier of the galaxy.

The map tape which had carried the record of this world—provided there had ever been one at all—must have rusted away past using, forgotten in some pigeonhole of Control archives generations ago. As a functioning unit in the Confederation scheme, Beltane had been in existence about a century at the outbreak of the Four Sectors War. That war lasted ten planet years.

Lugard said it was the beginning of the end for our kind and their rulership of the space lanes. There can rise empires of stars, and confederations, and other governments. But there comes a time when such grow too large or too old, or are rent from within. Then they collapse as will a balloon leaf when you prick it with a thorn, and all that remains is a withered wisp of stuff. Yet those on Beltane welcomed the news of the end of the war with a hope of new beginning, of return to that golden age of "before the war" on which the newest generation had been raised with legendary tales.

Perhaps the older settlers felt the chill of truth, but they turned from it as a man will seek shelter from the full blast of a winter gale. Not to look beyond the next corner will sometimes keep heart in a man. Since the population of Beltane was small, most of them specialists and members of such families, it had been drained of manpower by the services, and of the hundreds who were so drafted, only a handful returned There was no definite victory, only a weary drawing apart of the opponents from exhaustion.

Then began the interminable "peace talks," which led to a few clean-cut solutions. Our main concern was that Beltane now seemed forgotten by the powers that had established it. Had we not long before turned to living off the land, and the land been able to furnish us with food and clothing, we might have been in desperate straits. Even the biannual government ships, to which our commerce and communication had sunk in the last years of the war, had now twice failed to arrive, so that when a ship finally planeted, it was a cause for rejoicing — until the authorities discovered it was in no way an answer to our needs but rather was a fifth-rate tramp hastily commandeered to bring back a handful of those men who had been drafted off-world during the conflict.

Those veterans were indeed the halt and the blind — casualties of the military machine We strapped into the foreseats, and I set the course dial for Butte Hold. Nowadays it was necessary to keep both hands on the controls. There was too apt to be some sudden breakdown, and the automatics were not to be trusted. Since the war the settlements on Beltane had contracted instead of expanded. With a short supply of manpower, there had been little or no time wasted in visiting the outlying sites, abandoned one after another I hoped they would number among them some techneer-mechanics with training in the repair of vehicles.

Already our machines had become so unpredictable that some of the settlements talked of turning to beasts of burden The techneer-robos are all on duty at the labs. We have had no off-world supplies since Commander Tasmond lifted with the last of the garrison. Most of these hoppers are just pasted together, with hope the main ingredient of that paste.

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The Free Trade party is looking forward to independence and is trying to beam in a trader. Meanwhile, repairs go first for lab needs; the rest of it slides The breakup is here and now, boy. Each world will have to make the most of its own resources and be glad if someone else doesn't try to take them over—". Lugard shook his head. But it tore the Confederation to bits. Law and order — we won't see those come again in our time, not out there—" He motioned with one thin hand to the sky over us.

The lucky worlds with rich natural resources will struggle along for a generation or two, trying hard to keep a grip on civilization. Others will coast downhill fast. And there will be wolves tearing all around—". I believe it was an animal running in packs to pull down prey. The ferocity of such hunts lingered on in our race memories.

Yes, there will be wolf packs out now. But there are the remnants of broken fleets, ships whose home worlds were blasted, with no ports in which they will be welcomed. These can easily turn rogue, carrying on a way of life they have known for years, merely changing their name from commando to pirate. The known rich worlds will be struck first — and places where they can set up bases—" You say you want peace, that you think the war is over.

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Maybe the war is, the kind we have been fighting, but you don't have peace now — you have a vacuum out of which law, and what little protection any world can depend upon, has been drained. And into this is going to spread, just like one of your pet viruses, anarchy. A planet not prepared to defend itself is going to be a target for raiders.

There were fleets wrecked out there, worlds destroyed. The survivors of those battles are men who have been living by creating death around them for almost half a generation, planet time. It has become their familiar way of life — kill or be killed, take or perish. They have no home bases to return to; their ships are now their homes. And they no longer have any central controls, no fears of the consequences if they take what they want from the weaker, from those who cannot or will not make the effort to stand them off.

You let this ship land — only one ship, you say, poor lost people; give them living room as we have a sparsely settled world — there is one chance in a hundred you read them aright. One ship, two, three — a home port, a safe den from which to go raiding. After the mindless drudgery of the Long Night, eventually a new galactic empire will rise from the ashes, phoenix -like. Although, as previously mentioned, if a given planet has already gobbled up the low-hanging natural resources they may be in trouble because you just got one shot.

The Sword Worlds were a cluster of a dozen worlds beyond the edge of Old Federation space. They had been founded over five hundred years before — about the same time Tanith had been originally colonized — by 10, die-hard veterans of the System States Alliance, the great civil war that signaled the beginning of the end of the first great interstellar human culture, the world strong Federation. Instead they gathered at Abigor, the furthest planet out, and plunged into the unknown, uncharted galaxy in search of a safe, new world where they could live without their Federation foes even knowing they existed.

The Sword Worlds had built their own independent civilization in secret for almost four hundred years, when they finally began to tentatively return to the edges of Federation Space — only to find the government and civilization they had feared and fled from had long vanished.

The grand Federation was no more. What remained were abandoned colony worlds in various states of de-civilization , with a few bright jewels where the old Federation culture had survived its fall. The vast majority of the old colonies had fallen to the oxcart-and-battle-axe stage of development.

That made them highly vulnerable to exploitation by enterprising Sword Worlders. The neobarbarians, as the decivilized natives were termed, could rarely resist the advanced weapons of the Sword Worlds, and could not defend their valuable property. A generation after re-contact, the raiders — colorfully referred to as Space Vikings — were regularly journeying to the distant neobarb planets of the Old Federation and bringing home amazing amounts of loot and plunder to the Sword Worlds.

The distance between the nearest Sword World and the nearest world of the Old Federation was still over light-years. At a rate of an hour a light-year, that was far too long a voyage to return home quickly. So after fifty years or so of raiding, Space Vikings began selecting planets in the Old Federation to transform into raiding bases , places they could put in between raids and repair their ship, replace their crews, and sell their loot without the long trip back to the Sword Worlds.

Local bases allowed for much greater penetration and higher profits. And the natives on those worlds quickly picked up high technologies and other hallmarks of a starfaring civilization. The side effect was the neobarbs in contact with Space Vikings on those worlds were slowly being dragged back into civilization. Located deep in Old Federation space, three-thousand light-years from Gram, that was what Tanith was originally intended to be. Altla is just a medium-sized island.

Otherwise there are only rocks and reefs, submerged at double high tide, or even at Loa high. Damn those skimpy pilot's manuals! He'd have had to go to Spica for detailed information. If only there were a faster-than-light equivalent of radio. Instant communications unified planets; but the days and weeks and months between stars let their systems drift culturally apart—let hell brew for years, unnoticed till it boiled over— made a slow growth of feudalism, within the Imperial structure itself, inevitable.

Of course, that would give civilization something to fall back on when the Long Night finally came. Instead, we had already settled more than two hundred worlds. We might now be extinct were it not for the Alderson Drive. The same tramline effect that colonized the stars, the same interstellar contacts that allowed the formation of the First Empire, allow interstellar war. The worlds wrecked in two hundred years of Secession Wars were both settled and destroyed by ships using the Alderson Drive.

He put the instrument away and looked down. They were over mountainous country, and he saw no signs of war. The Navy had no time for prolonged sieges. Imperial policy was to finish rebellions at the lowest possible cost in lives-but to finish them. A holdout rebel planet might be reduced to glittering lava fields, with nothing surviving but a few cities lidded by the black domes of Langston Fields; and what then? Plague and famine would follow. Yet, he thought, it was the only possible way.

He had sworn the Oath on taking the Imperial commission. Humanity must be reunited into one government, by persuasion or by force, so that the hundreds of years of Secession Wars could never happen again. Every Imperial officer had seen what horrors those wars brought; that was why the academies were located on Earth instead of at the Capital.

As they neared the city he saw the first signs of battle. A ring of blasted lands, mined outlying fortresses, broken concrete rails of the transportation system; then the almost untouched city which had been secure within the perfect circle of its Langston Field. The city had taken minor damage, but once the Field was off, effective resistance had ceased. Only fanatics fought on against the Imperial Marines. Both worlds were partially depopulated during the Secession Wars, with New Ireland joining the rebel forces while New Scotland remained staunchly loyalist.

After interstellar travel was lost in the TransCoalsack Sector, New Scotland continued the struggle until its rediscovery by the Second Empire. In science fiction the level of technology has to be more advanced than present-day state-of-the-art, otherwise where is the fun in that? Indeed, in some science fiction a single advance in technology starts off the entire plot, with the balance of the novel spent exploring the ramifications and changes caused to society i.

Kicking it up a notch, some s novels were about a series of technological advances one after the other, usually in the form of an arms race. Gotta explore the tech tree. Such science fiction novels can make the readers impatient with the real world. They often complain that we have reached the 21st century yet there are still no ubiquitous flying cars, jet packs, cities on the ocean floor, nor lunar colonies.

Having said that, such science fiction readers are often oblivious to the titanic tech advances they have personally lived through. Such as the advent of the internet. Which made this entire website possible. So the most common error science fiction writers make is drastically underestimating the rate of technological advance.

For details about predicting the technological future, refer to Robert Heinlein's essay "Where To? Clarke's Profiles of the Future. In the 's it was "Radio. In the 's it was "Atomic," for obvious reasons. In the 's it was "Transistorized". In the 's it was "Laser". In the 's it was "Computerized". Currently it is "Nanotechnolgy. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Even if it actually a screw. So if you invent some fabulous scientific breakthrough for your SF story, try to resist the temptation to use it as the solution for everything. You can see how silly it becomes. In James Burke's fascinating documentary Connections , the first episode points out that technological progress was impossible until one key thing had been invented: Without the plow, all one person could manage to feed was themselves and maybe their family.

The culture could not afford the luxury of supporting citizens whose job was inventing innovations instead of raising food. But with the development of the plow, suddenly a surplus of food appears. Inventors can be supported, and the headlong rush of technological progress is off and running. And in Jerry Pournelle's Janissaries , the Earth mercenaries are marooned on a primitive planet. The first thing they ask for from their alien owners is a copy of James Burke's Connections book, with an eye towards converting the primitive planet into an industrial one.

The book is practically a blueprint. Fred Hoyle has suggested that the reestablishment of civilization may not be as easy as it sounds. Our civilization developed using fossil fuels as an energy source. At the present rate of growth, in another 50 or years We will have exhausted all fossil fuels on Earth.

If our civilization were to destroy itself at that time, the absence of fossil fuels would make the development of a successor civilization unlikely, at least for a few hundreds of millions of years. Hoyle has a point. As civilization on Terra advanced, it used up all the low hanging fruit. All the easily accessible petroleum and rare minerals have been extracted.

Now you have to use incredibly difficult techniques like fracking and deep offshore oil drilling. Which means if some civilization destroying apocalypse strikes Class 2 Civilization Extinction , Scope: Societal Collapse , any new civilization attempting to increase its technology level will crash into an overwhelming road block. Basically they will have to make the jump from medieval technology to offshore oil drilling in one step. If you screw up and destroy your civilization, you'll have to wait a few hundreds of millions of years for your next chance.

Richard Duncan is even more pessimistic. His Olduvai theory predicts that the lifetime of an industrial civilization is under years, apocalypse or no. As near as I can figure his theory hinges on the " peak oil " phenomenon. He predicts our technological civlization will start contracting about the year This sad fate can be avoided by purchasing some insurance: The second and subsequent civilizations on a given planet will probably be forced into landfill mining of landfills created by the prior civilization. The natural resources needed to sustain a high-tech civilization are being used up.

If some other cataclysm destroys the technology we have, it may not be possible to climb back up to present levels if natural conditions are less favorable than they were for our ancestors, for example if the most easily exploitable coal, oil, and mineral resources have been depleted. On the other hand, if plenty of information about our technological feats is preserved, that could make a rebirth of civilization easier. Pulling back from the tight-focus shock for a moment, we know that development isn't inevitable.

If there are no large reserves of coal and iron to mine you're unlikely to get widespread deployment of steam engines. If it's easier for your second sons to set out and march into unoccupied territory and set up farming than to try and eke more food out of a smaller subdivided family farm, you won't get increases in population density until you butt up against the Malthusian limits.

If your political system generates a succession crisis that can only be resolved by a brutal and destructive civil war once every generation, that's not going to be conductive to long-term capital accumulation and investment, or to development of a culture of respect for the rule of law including observance of any form of property law not enforced at swordpoint. If your religion insists that women are chattel and slaveowning is just fine, then the aristocratic beneficiaries of such a system have little incentive to improve productivity and conditions that benefit their perceived inferiors.

But the ability of a pre-industrial empire to enforce social norms globally is hampered by their ability to operate on a worldwide scale: As previously mentioned, the most common error science fiction writers make is drastically underestimating the rate of technological advance. A hundred years ago the Wright brother made the first powered flight in that motorized kite they called the " Flyer ".

Nowadays we have Boeing passenger liners. Therefore a mere hundred years from now there will be aircraft that make the look like the Wright Flyer.

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What I am saying is that Star Wars technology is more like years from now, not ten thousand years from now. In ten thousand years we will all be cosmic StarGods who sculpt entire galaxies as art projects. Authors who worry about such details try to come up with a way to put the brakes on progress. Due to reaction from the aftermath of a horrific world war, world culture decided to take a rest from technological progress for a few centuries. In Jerry Pournelle's CoDominion novels , the government suppresses all research that might upset the military balance, which is basically all research.

Scientific research was made illegal. Heck, study and book-larnin' was made illegal excep for the privileged "Peacemen" of the new regime. And the former scientists were made into menial slaves. Progress has ground to a halt. And the Long Night dark ages following the decline and fall of the Galactic empire is always a good way to reset the clock by a thousand years or so.

These are a few of the many ways that "thinking-man's" authors use to justify writing stories about, say, recognizable reader-friendly galactic kings and queens. Otherwise logic dictates they'd be being forced to write science fiction about some unrecognizable reader-unfriendly bizarre cyberpunk dystopia. Hard for the author to write, and it drastically limits their reader-base. Non-scientific authors do not have that problem.

They just write unabashedly write science-fantasy about recognizable galactic kings and queens with no justification. Because they figure their reader base is too unsophisticated to know any better. But such authors probably avoid this website in the first place, frightened away at the sight of the first equation.

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